On 5/22/2011 1:56 AM, Gar Lipow wrote: On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
Carrol: One partial 'solution' I imagine would be a return to state 'supervision' of the trade and cessation of attempts to stop it. What many Mexicans want is for the U.S. to legalize drugs.
Gar: That would help, but would not as much as you might imagine. NAFTA would still be in place and the drug cartels would still exist. Prohibition contributed to tremendous growth in organized crime, but ending alcohol prohibition did not shrink organized crime (illegal organized crime I mean) back to pre-prohibition size.
Carrol: No one would claim that crime as such can be eliminated. But we are talkign aboaut something unprecedented in Mexico: Criminal cartels creating a virtual civil war. And I really don't see what NAFTA has to do with this. And the "Drug" cartels would not still be there. But it is only the enormous UJ.S. consumption of _illegal_ drugs that underlies their present level of activity.
Incidentally, before states established state lotteries, 40% of the outside cash that flowed into the inner cities came from selling numbers. That of course helped support local business within the ghetto.
State lotteries abolished the numbers racket. It was replaced with drug sales, which account for the same percentage of outside funds flowing into the inner cities. The numbers racket was a reasonably peaceful one, not requiring much warfare. (There was one black worker in the section of Deroit Transmission when I worked there in 1955: he also sold numbers.) Some equally remunerative and bloody form of crime might replace drugs were drugs legalized, but that is irrelevant. The fact is that at present the War on Drugs is creating Civil War in Mexico; that Civil War is independent of the effects of NAFTA (which of course IS fundamental to the flow of migration from Mexico). And as of now, no one knows how that Civil War can be ended.
The War on Drugs, however, is fundamental to U.S. policy in Latin America, and it will remain so lacking a mass movement in the U.S. for the legalization of drugs - and that is not going to happen very soon. So . . .?
Carrol